As I’ve noted many times before, if you’re a fan of arcade shooters, the past generation or so has given us an embarrassment of riches, especially if you have a Switch. While it’s great to load some of these titles up on a big screen, the fact that it capably handles pretty well everything the genre has to offer in portable form to boot (including playing vertically if you have something like a Flip Grip) makes it arguably the console of choice for the subgenre. We’ve seen a pretty wide variety of offerings, ranging from retro to roguelike to tough-as-nails bullet hell titles, but aside from its modernized presentation R-Type Dimensions III simply plays a bit differently.

While I would typically think of older shooters as having generalized patterns, for the most part I simply think of how I’d load up and simply follow my instincts. Sure, when you’ve played a game enough times you’ll tend to use the same strategies, know where there’s something hidden, or tackle specific bosses in a certain way, but more often than not I think about just being in the zone while playing, dodging and weaving as I’d go. Bullet hell titles are a bit different, and you will generally learn how to avoid specific waves of attacks, knowing where your window of safety is. I’d say that’s roughly what you have in this conversion of an SNES classic, though you won’t necessarily be worried about bullets, just learning where to be when the game throws things at you that you don’t normally see.

The thing is, the game’s more modern look is pretty cool, and it does bring the series forward even while following the rules of the classic game. You can even switch between the old look and the new on the fly to verify that under the hood, this is the same overall experience. That said, more so than almost any shooter I’ve played in the last generation I really had a tough time bumping up against what felt by the imposed constraints of play. There are just areas and moments where you really need to know where to position yourself or you’ll be toast. Worse, this is the sort of game where you can crank on through sections while you’re powered up, but once you’re not maxed out you can expect to be incredibly vulnerable. It’s true, this does simply follow the roadmap of the original, and I can respect that, but there’s no question that within the subgenre this is very much an acquired taste.